AKT was born 1998 in Bologna/Italy. Four members made up the original line-up, sometimes they were in five, now the band is consisting of Simone Negrini (drums, keyboards), Marco Brucale (guitars) and Alessandro Malandra (bass). Initially they produce single songs then collected in emotionally moulded albums which are available for free on their homepage so far. The band hopes the music will be often downloaded and requested, observed and criticized: 'Music should be made known, spread abroad, communicated, should be free, open and shared in order to be managed and edited as a discovery' as they say.

I got in touch with the band and Simone patiently answered my many questions.

When,
where and by whom was your band born ?
Did any of you, past and present members, play in any other bands
before joining up in your band? Why did you choose that name and
which bands were you influenced by ?

Hmm,
the
birth of the band was both a bit complicated and a bit funny. The
first contact between current Akt members occurred around 1995 when
Iovis Lacrimae, a classical/melodic-prog band in which Simone played
as lead guitarist, was auditioning for a bass player and Marco showed
up with his Chapman Stick. During the audition itself, it became
quickly apparent that the band’s and Marco’s aesthetic priorities
didn’t match that well, and he didn’t join. The next auditioned
bass player was no one else than Alessandro, and he became Iovis
Lacrimae’s bass player for a few years.

In the meanwhile, Simone
and Marco decided they wanted to explore other musical areas and they
founded their own (then nameless) band, recruiting the
singer/songwriter Federico Colli, “drummer extraordinaire” Nicola
Fanci and multi-instrumentalist Emanuele Girotti. Several other
players came and went, while the ideas were defined (and refined)
until around 1998 the name “Akt” was finally chosen for a
formation including Nicola, Simone, Marco (who in the meanwhile had
sold his stick to Stadio’s Roberto Drovandi and became a
guitarist), and Alessandro.

“Akt”
is a german word meaning “nude”, but it also has strong
connotations of “taking action” in many languages. Akt is meant
to be a band in which one’s musical self must be expressed “as
nakedly as possible”, with the explicit provision that its members
must “wear no musical clothes” in the sense of hiding one’s
self behind established musical clichés when at all possible. This
means fully embracing the sometimes nonsensical, sometimes trite and
sometimes embarrassing nature of spontaneous creativity. This also
means that if you hear strong influences by, say, King Crimson or
Banco in our music, it’s not because we want to pay some kind of
homage to them: it’s because we emotionally internalized their
music so deeply that now our spontaneous creativity includes those
languages.

Anyway, the bands that
influenced us most are King Crimson (Red and Discipline lineups
mostly), Banco del Mutuo Soccorso, Area, Gentle Giant, Oregon, Stormy
Six, and a few selected others. We also like newer stuff like
Porcupine Tree or KTU, but it doesn’t make the same big impact on
what we are as the older stuff does, for some reason.

Over
to your releases. Please tell us more about...
Déntrokirtòs from 2007

Did
you ever see
the so-called “sensory homunculus”?
http://27.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ksyy9hQRv21qz8j06o1_400.png
It
shows what a man’s body would look like if each part grew in
proportion to the area of the cortex of the brain concerned with its
sensory perception (but I’m quite sure they got it all wrong
regarding the, hmm, reproductive apparatus). Well, Déntrokirtòs is
an imaginary island that could be a good representation of what a
place would look like if each part grew in proportion to the
perception we have about an ideal world. Every place in the world has
some facets that we may feel as perfect, small parts that correspond
to our need of “being there” in that very moment. But there’s
no place that has all of these aspects at the same time. Dentrokirtos
is our attempt to describe the place that combine all of these
aspects. Each song was created with to model sensations brought up in
us by some small natural detail. For instance, Helichrysum is a
flower that grows on a wide area along Mediterranean Sea, its
particular feature is the incredible, strong, mysteriously sweet
fragrance lingering over the valleys, mountains and seasides that
host it, giving them a precise and unmistakable identity. The fact is
this flower keep on smelling like thus even if it’s cut off.

Many
others aspects that we consider perfect lies on Dentrokirtos, as the
crystal-clear sky
that enables us to watch even the furthest comets, a lighthouse, a
light drying wind, the presence of the wind turbine assuring clean
energy, clean water, charming spots, impressive landscapes and
wonderful panoramas. On our website you can get this island and
virtually walk up and down its paths choosing where you want to go.
Keeping in mind all of these visions we have made up this album.

To
give the project a bit more coherence, we wrote the pieces as the
diary of a journey, and if you listen carefully each piece begins
with a theme based on something that was introduced in the finale of
the previous song, forming a continuous chain except in one carefully
chosen occasion. The lyrics are a narration from the point of view of
someone that departs from everyday life (spazzadiluvi), arrives to
the island (elicrisio), becomes an inhabitant, merges with that
place’s nature, then watches back at what he was before coming
here. The last glimpse of description we have of the unnamed
protagonist is him/her approaching “the gate” at the end of “le
sette impressioni del fauno scorpione”.
Nothing else is said, as the finale is quite open. But the more
perceptive listener might notice an extremely specific hint at the
very end of our latest LP that might explain… OK, I won’t say
more than this…

Please
tell us more about...
frAKTal.one from 2008

The
point is that in our LP releases, we don’t care whether a given
piece of music is actually doable
in a live setup or not. If we feel we need five interlocking guitar
tracks, two mellotrons, four different percussions, double-bass and
electric bass, we happily overdub everything we need. But we also
want some material to play live! And, the band is now a trio, so this
means we had to redistribute roles a bit to be still able to function
as a live band. Simone abandoned guitar for drums and programming,
Marco gradually shifted to classical guitar and looping, and
Alessandro expanded his sonic palette with electronics and other
weird stuff. The point is that we don’t really care about shining
as players of a given instrument, we just try to channel Akt’s
stuff as effectively as possible.

The
“frAKTal" series of color-coded EPs contains those pieces of
music that we arrange specifically for live performing. The crimson
EP, frAKTal.one, is genuinely, 100% recorded “live-in-studio”
without any
overdubs or corrections (as you might tell from the large number of
blunders), just a huge headache-inducing amount of live triggering
and looping by the three of us. It’s very funny to play this stuff
live, but also really demanding!

Please
tell us more about...
Blemmebeya from earlier this year

The
title Blemmebeya has a very funny
origin. Some time in mid 2007, as we were finalizing the last details
of Dentrokirtos, joking with words, as we usually do, one of us wrote
“Blemmebeya” on the wall. That was very amusing for us due to the
sounding and accents of this nonsensical word, although the context
that brought this phoneme up are lost forever. As a half-joke, we
decide it should definitely have been the name of our next album.
Later, when we were discussing the plot and concept of our new album,
we investigated this word more seriously and we discovered it matched
exactly what we intended to express through this album. As a matter
of fact this word is composed by Blemme and Beya. The first is the
name of an ancient tribe described in Roman histories of the later
empire, from Wikipedia we read: “ (…)They
also became fictionalized as a legendary race of acephalous
(headless) monsters who had eyes and mouths on their chest”.
It was perfect for our album since we wanted to describe the effects
of the media on italian population, the result is a “headless”
people indeed, but this is strictly between you and me! 
The word Beya is the name of a people living in the horn of Africa
(in this case you can find it on Wikipedia searching for Beja), in
Roman times this people have been named Blemmyes. Moreover Pliny the
Elder asserted that Blemmyes people lived also in Ethiopia and one of
the word they used to describe themselves was “Beya”. There were
more spooky coincidences around the word, like our recording studio
“Nellarmadiostudio” being located in a street that bears the name
of a renaissance-era erudite person who also wrote about the
blemmyes…

So,
we think fate has decided the name for our album.
Then, about the concept-album itself, we tried to stage a contrast
between the product of the cultural crisis of our people, and the
dynamic agents of reality represented by weather: funny to say, but
people must deal with weather everyday, either it rains or snows or
it is sunny and hot, nature is something that goes over and over the
people’s ignorance in the sense of people who has been beheaded by
controlled information media. The album is constructed as a
continuous juxtaposition of pieces referring to the “assault of the
media” (as we call it in “l’assalto”) and to more
naturalistic pieces referring to the names of winds. There are spots
of hope and desperation throughout, although the very end of the
album might feel totally depressing and pessimistic if you can follow
the lyrics (we should put translations on our site sooner or later).
We don’t feel this is necessarily true, although we’ve left a
small hint in the track “la fine” that might put things in
perspective…

Please
tell us more about...
Your brand new frAKTal.two

After
finalizing Blemmebeya, we wanted to do something less demanding and
simpler. We
had these small embryonic pieces that felt like a coherent whole but
didn’t seem able to develop in a full-size concept album. This
small EP is somewhat like those quick notes you take on the margin of
what you’re reading. We’ve chosen a very simple instrumentation
for these pieces, we’ve cut everything down to acoustic instruments
only and practically no overdubs. Try to listen to this pieces when
you’re close to a large body of water.

All these are free
downloads. Why give your releases away for free ?

Ah,
the big question
:-D We have strong opinions on the contemporary concept of “editor”.
In the ages past, an “editor” was someone who made it possible
for an intellectual product to reach the audience. Nowadays, in the
internet era, they exist to do exactly the opposite, to prevent
people to just download, copy and share intellectual products. They
are nonsensical enforcers of an “artificial scarcity of
commodities” and have no reason to exist.

We
do believe
all forms of art including music should be shared as a work of love,
and not sold as a product. A close parallel is what happens (or
should happen) in the scientific community: when you create a musical
idea you are the author of a discovery. The song, as the ensemble of
notes, tempo and moods, has always been there and you should not make
it private. In fact there is a great reward for you as the author:
that is your discovery may reach other people. Art should definitely
be open source. We don’t “give away” our music: we “share”
it.

The music is a bit
difficult to pinpoint. But how would you describe your music and
which bands would you compare yourself to ?

Don’t
worry, we cannot pinpoint our music neither… Or
to put it in another way, our albums represent the different attempts
we make at creating coherent stories out of the wildly disparate
stuff we constantly come up with. I’m pretty sure that lots of prog
bands did, and still do, exactly this. For us, the only absolutely
anti-prog thing is to just do derivative stuff, or to do something
that turns out to be exactly what you’ve foreseen, just according
to plan. We prefer to take risks and even sound stupid and
embarrassing at times, if that means that we’re true to the
original vision.

What have you been up
to this year ? What is your plans for this year and beyond ?

At
the beginning of this
year we finalized Blemmebeya, then we quickly recorded frAKTal.two as
a kind of de-compression routine. We are very satisfied because
Blemmebeya has been downloaded hundreds of times (500 and counting)
from our website and people keeps grabbing it from all over the
world. Dentrokirtos is also downloaded quite regularly… Sooner or
later we’ll put some stats on the website, to say a big thank you
to everyone who actually contacts us to give their opinion after
downloading. BTW, downloading the files actually requires that you
promise us to send your opinion on what you hear… So it’s not
100% free after all :-D

The future is currently
like a giant cauldron of possibilities. We have a small group of
ideas that are currently fighting for supremacy, they all want our
undivided attention. But there’s this lingering premonition of the
overall look and feel of our next LP. It might take years for it to
take shape, but don’t worry, it will eventually reach maturity. We
might need to do a few more frAKTals, smaller projects helping us to
pinpoint the right direction. But the new LP will come, and it will
be free!

To wrap up this
interview, is there anything you want to add to this interview ?

Music
doesn’t need to be a commercial product in order to exist. Feel,
create and share.

I downloaded Blemmebeya a short while ago after hearing it for the first time on progstreaming.com and I have listened to it three or four times now. I still owe them my opinion (and I will not withhold it), but my first impression is that this is an excellent album (in ratings: the uppermost part of the 4-star range) to which I will listen quite a lot during the next months.

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